The Virtual Assistant Goes Elementary With IBM’s Sherlock

By

Amir Mizroch

Oct 2, 2015 8:22 am ET

A team at IBM and Cardiff University in Wales is working on a virtual assistant that isn’t part of the artificial-intelligence in-crowd led by the likes of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa.

While those apps crunch ever-larger amounts of data to do things like call someone from your contact list, tell you when it is time to leave for the airport or just have a witty conversation with you, the IBM/Cardiff team’s experimental Sherlock assistant takes a different approach. It gets its information not from IBM’s vast computer networks but from other Sherlock users, in what is called a crowdsourced model.